1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle management system capable of managing health conditions of individual user vehicles. More particularly, the present invention relates to a vehicle management system for confirming a travel condition of each user vehicle and pursuing the cause of a malfunction and trouble in the vehicle with ease.
2. Description of the Related Art
A control system of a vehicle, such as an automobile, is constructed as a complicated electronic control system, and when there occurs an abnormal state, high levels of expertise in knowledge and judgment are required to pursue the cause of the abnormality. Therefore, it has been recently proposed to provide the self-diagnosing function for trouble diagnosis in an on-board electronic control unit. When any abnormal state is detected by on-board diagnosis based on the self-diagnosing function, an alarm lamp or the like is lit up to issue an alarm to a driver, thereby prompting the driver to take check and repair of the vehicle in, e.g., a dealer""s service factory. In the service factory, an external device, e.g., a trouble diagnosing device, is connected to the on-board electronic control unit for reading internal data, such as trouble location data and trouble data, from the on-board electronic control unit. Check and repair are then performed based on the read data.
One example of such a trouble diagnosing device is disclosed in Japanese Examined Patent Application Publication No. 7-15427 filed by the assignee of this application. The disclosed trouble diagnosing device is able to read data in an on-board electronic control unit, i.e., detection signals of various sensors and switches, control signals outputted to various actuators such as injectors, within-system computation data, etc. which are stored in the on-board electronic control unit, by utilizing a body of the trouble diagnosing device or connecting a computer for an external expert system to the body of the trouble diagnosing device. As a result, it is possible to pursue the trouble location or the cause of trouble and to perform necessary repair or adjustment.
However, malfunctions or troubles of vehicles sometimes occur depending on a travel condition of each vehicle. For example, when a vehicle is repeatedly subjected to a travel condition in which the vehicle runs just a short distance in most cases such that it starts running immediately after starting of an engine and the engine operation is stopped before reaching sufficient warm-up of the engine, there may occur carbon fouling of spark plugs, oil dilution, etc., thus resulting in an engine malfunction. Such a trouble caused depending on the vehicle travel condition is detected with the self-diagnosing function only after the trouble has occurred in fact. Even in the occurrence of an actual trouble, pursuit of the trouble location is just possible to achieve and a difficulty arises in pursuit of the true cause leading to the trouble.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a vehicle management system capable of confirming travel conditions of individual user vehicles and pursuing the cause of a malfunction and trouble in each vehicle with ease.
A vehicle management system according to the present invention is featured in statistically processing travel information of individual vehicles in respective on-board control units and transmitting the processed information to an external database, and analyzing travel conditions of the individual vehicles based on data accumulated in the database, and distributing an analyzed result to at least one of a relevant user of each vehicle and a department having an access right to the database.
With those features, travel information of individual vehicles is statistically processed in respective on-board control units and transmitted to an external database, and travel conditions of the individual vehicles are analyzed based on data accumulated in the database. Then, an analyzed result is distributed to at least one of a relevant user of each vehicle and a department having an access right to the database. Therefore, when there occurs a malfunction or trouble in any vehicle, the cause of the malfunction or trouble can be pursued with ease, and an advice on the optimum driving method can be given to the user. Also, feeding the analyzed result back to the relevant department contributes to developing optimum control specifications and improving system reliability.
The above and other objects, features and advantages of the invention will become more clearly understood from the following description referring to the accompanying drawings.